The Mending Wall
That Robert Frost is, in some sense, a poet of nature is hardly a debatable proposition.
Birches and wild flowers, woods and stone walls, pasture springs and precarious farms and the snow of northern New England — these things provide, not merely locale, but substance. Remove them from Frost’s work and something more than symbol or exemplar is gone, something that is intimately involved with a bent, a way of looking at the world, a set of instinctive, or near-instinctive, affirmations and denials that, from the earliest days of Frost’s writing career, have manifested themselves with an almost undeviating persistence (Sylvester 1915). That these poems touch on ultimate values seems clear – ultimate, at least, within the framework that Frost allows himself in his poetry. (The qualification is of central importance in evaluating Frost. Integrity and wholeness, self- confirmation and self-renewal, are surely valuable only in terms of what the self is that demonstrates integrity or experiences renewal; they are not self-justifying characteristics. For the present, however, I wish to confine myself largely to describing certain aspects of Frost work, reserving judgment on them for later chapters.) And that these ultimate values ultimately reveal themselves in a “natural” context seems clear also. The wilderness of “Into My Own” as compared to the Mending Wall must be trackless; the soberer is one in which, tracklessness being a fairly unreal condition in New England, nature is at least reasserting its primal dominance. Briefly, and at the risk of a platitude, one can say that Frost values and Frost’s view of nature are intimately related, a point on which both Frost defenders and his detractors generally agree. My purpose in urging the obvious is this: that there are, very broadly speaking, two kinds of poet to whom the label “poet of nature” may reasonably be applied (Hugh, 1945).
On the one hand, there is the ingenuous nature lover, for whom trees are green, birds melodious, and rabbits furry, and who reports these observations in verse. Assuming a degree of technical skill, such poets are at worst harmless and at best capable of communicating a degree of genuine, if elementary, wonder, as was W. H. Davies, for example. On the other hand, there is the poet for whom external nature has a philosophically serious significance, either deliberately worked out or revealed by its implicit presence in a substantial body of work. Such poets may be capable of compelling powerful responses in the receptive reader, responses with an ethical or a metaphysical dimension; in their degrees, Lucretius, Wordsworth, Hardy, and perhaps Robinson Jeffers are representative of the class. And while it is true that Frost’s poems occasionally suggest the work of a localized New England Davies – “Mending Wall” for example, particularly if one considers the poems out of the context of Frost’s work as a whole — i
Processing your request, Please wait....
